Easily characterizable as yet another example in an endless series of bad tourist behavior (see also: etching your and your girlfriend’s name into a wall of the Colosseum), something about a particular modern abuse in tourism—selfie taking—truly does make one yearn for simpler times in “traveling antics.” Or, in this case, “gondola antics.” This being part of the latest selfie taking snafu captured on camera and shared ad nauseam via various platforms. While the video doesn’t show the moment of the fall, it does reveal the aftermath of a boat capsizing, leaving in its wake a group of very “surprised,” very wet Chinese tourists (for once, the “Dumbfuck Award” didn’t go to American tourists instead). Yet how could they really be surprised when they were told repeatedly to sit the fuck down by their gondolier? Namely, during the “portion of the program” where the gondolier specifically warned them that he was about to make a maneuver whose success was entirely contingent upon the distribution of the weight inside the boat. An artful maneuver that most gondoliers are required to execute when they ferry the gondola under a bridge. You know, Madonna in the “Like A Virgin” video-style.
A video that, for years, inspired many a tourist in Venice to attempt recreating some of M’s iconic writhing and gyrating on a gondola as it went under bridges and wound around canals. All while Madonna made it look so effortless in her blue Spandex pants and sleeveless black dress with cutouts at the sides, her layers of crucifix necklaces bouncing in the wind. Jumping and bopping as tourists on a bridge above her look down in what one might imagine to be awe. After all, back in 1984, such varietals of outrageous behavior in Venice were the exception, not the rule. With the advent of smartphones, not only was existence never the same, but neither was Venice. Already constantly teeming with tourists (to the point where a cap on the number of visitors will take effect), outfitting every single one of them with a pocket-size, easily accessible camera (made all the more appealing because it could also connect to the internet, where they could post the picture they had just taken) undeniably caused a change for the worse in that particular city.
Madonna’s playful jumping intermixed with sensual dancing seems positively tame in retrospect compared to some of the other things tourists will get up to nowadays (on a gondola or elsewhere) in the name of “living for the Insta/TikTok.” And, lest one forget, we never really see Madonna “rocking the boat,” so to speak—thanks to artful camerawork by director Mary Lambert, who shoots Madonna from a low-angle or waist-level position during most of these instances to merely give the illusion that she’s actually engaging in all of this “capsizing behavior” for real.
In the non-cinematic version of this narrative, however, the gondolier would have surely told Madonna the same thing that the Chinese tourists were told: bitch, sit down. Be humble. Granted, the Queen of Pop did appear to have far more reverence for the Queen of the Adriatic than your average tourist of the moment. So it was that during her 1998 episode of VH1’s Behind the Music, Madonna described Venice as a “very, very romantic place.” But of course it would seem that way to her. For one thing, it was “pre-social-media-ruining-every-tourist-destination.” For another, she stayed at Hotel Cipriani, a staple of Venice’s luxury hotel scene since the very year Madonna was born: 1958. It was one of the only options in town with a pool and, per Lambert, Madonna wanted to make sure she had access to one for her workout regimen. She also wanted to make sure she could avoid the video’s producer, Simon Fields, of whom Lambert said, “[He] still wanted to sleep with her—so did everybody else, for that matter.” That kind of “aura” about Madonna is at least part of why the streets and canals were ostensibly cleared for the video shoot…Lambert didn’t want to have a Love Potion No. 9 situation on her hands with one mere cough out of M’s mouth. By the same token, Madonna, being a Leo and still new to fame, relished the crowds that would start to gather behind the scenes and call her, according to her, a “puta”—the Spanish word for whore, though Madonna was looking for the Italian one: “puttana.”
As for reasons why Madonna and Lambert homed in on Venice for the bulk of the video shoot, the former remarked, “We felt Venice symbolized so many things, like virginity. And I’m Madonna, and I’m Italian.” Except for when she can’t find the correct word for whore in said language. Nonetheless, there’s no denying that Madonna had far more legitimate reasons for “making Venice her playground” than the artless tourists in the vein of the capsized Chinese ones mentioned above. Which brings us to how the real puttani of the moment are those who can’t resist the temptation of vanity that comes with “peddling themselves” online. And not even for the sake of “influencing,” but rather, the sake of the errant likes that might validate their existence. Including, of course, a selfie taken while crossing under a Venetian bridge in a gondola. The very same thing Madonna did back in 1984…without the selfie part. For, you see, there was a benefit to a lack of democratization in “art” (selfies being deemed as such by “influencers” such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian): it meant that not just any old asshole could try to bill what they were doing as precisely that.
This extends, to be sure, to “social media curation.” What historians, should there be any trace of humanity left in the future, will look back on as the “preeminent” “art form” of the twenty-first century. Perhaps forgetting altogether there was a time when tourist “hot spots” like Venice weren’t so drenched in stupidity in service of social media, as opposed to in service of more reined-in postmodern art à la the “Like A Virgin” video. Now that was an instance of (semi-)controlled antics one could actually get behind. For there remains in its wake a true piece of art that stands the test of time…as opposed to an embarrassing viral TikTok video that will be lost to a black hole once the next short clip captivates the millions who use the app.
